So it wasn’t so much that the Fundamental Fysiks group were introducing radical new strains of thought, but rather standing on the shoulders of that pre war core of physicists. That’s right. And many of them thought that way at the time. They wanted to recapture a way of doing physics that they found very exciting and read about, but which hadn’t been a part of their formal training. Many of the folks who joined this very informal, ragtag discussion group had been attracted to physics in the first place by reading these juicy, popular books written by the likes of Heisenberg himself or George Gamow that emphasized the philosophical stakes in play. That real break from our ordinary intuitions that quantum theory seemed to be putting on the table. So that’s what they saw physics as being all about. Those deep, universal, ‘what does it all mean’ questions; those metaphysical quests that drove their passions and drew them into the field. And then when they arrived at college and graduate school, they
discovered that those kinds of questions weren’t even on the radar. It just wasn’t how the post war textbooks presented the material or what their studies emphasized in any way. In fact, that interpretative approach was being actively belittled by most of their teachers as they passed through the various stages of their formal training, and the field that they had dedicated so much to no longer resembled the one they’d been reading about and based their assumptions on. By the time they emerged from their studies with PHD’s in hand, the physics world was going through a horrendous crash where funding was dropping like a stone, enrollments were falling and job opportunities were vanishing at an alarming rate. So in some sense, they felt as if they had nothing to lose. They weren’t going to carve a regular looking career in the field in the way they would have been able to do just a few years previously. So with their passions undimmed for those burning philosophical challenges, they figured why not start a